Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

The princess spent most of the day and dusk diving for loot. She could hold her breath for three minutes at a time, dragging a Disk down there and heaping it up with the stuff she found in her Tremblesense, or shifting rubble around and out of the way with her inhuman strength to get at the stuff.

She said there was a lot of decayed organic stuff scattered around the place, mixed in with the minerals that had survived the times. What might have been paper money at some point broke apart into scattered fragments in the water, and there were definitely several chests that had probably been treated with spatial expansion magic that had exploded when the Veil hardened on top of them, spilling all the contents out and introducing them to what might have been a magical catastrophe at the same time.

The remnants of bottles and flasks indicated at least some alchemical supplies had been among the hoard below, now long gone and dissipated into the brackish water. Mostly, it was intermixed collections of raw minerals, of surprising purity once they were scooped up and deposited on Disks, taken upstairs, Sifted, and separated.

Shape Stone was a bit of overkill, but it made a nice lining for woven reed platters and baskets to accept the different kinds of materials and stack them up after I used Prestidigitation to clean them up and dry them off.

Towards the end, I stuck Crown into the water down near her, using her Tremblesense to guide me as I gathered up the last of the stuff for her to scoop into a Disk, and we called it a night, heading up top to look over everything.

---

We had a couple dozen woven reed platters thinly lined with stone when all was said and done. Everything was separated and heaped up by material as Kris examined it all with a grave eye, backing up what my basic Assay had told her, stirring a black-nailed finger through the heaps as we sat on the floor of the upper sitting room.

“Well?” I asked her, as the last of the minerals heaped up in little mounds of dust, pebbles, and nuggets to the appropriate platters. Some of them were heaped up and quite sizable, like the steel and iron. The gemstones were smaller and scattered, ranging from actual cut gemstones to just powder and dust, and everything in between.

Kristie pulled over the Disk that was holding the platter with hundreds of pounds of slivers and chunks of steel, forcing her hand into the mass and looking elsewhere with her eyes. “These... were made using some kind of smelting technique, probably separated by the Quality Level, and then heaped back together when we retrieved them. There’s some very high-quality stuff in here, with excellent nickel and carbon balance, and then there’s some stuff only good for scrapwork. The same applies to pretty much everything else, but there’s a big bias towards high quality in a lot of this stuff.” She reached out into the pile of darkened bronze, looking away as she paid attention to her Tremblesense. “If we were to rate this stuff from 11 to 30, this whole stack of bronze is 27 to 30. This is really well-smelted bronze.”

I was impressed. “The iron?” I pointed to the rusting stuff.

“Pre-alloy, bias of 28 to 32. Like the steel, there’s some scrap, but not much. Like they were saving the good stuff. Same applies to the brass, the copper, even the silver and gold, and I have no idea why.”

“The Air Gold?” I’d been kind of surprised when we’d found no coins down there at all, but the scattered stuff was obviously the same raw material, with its faint greenish hue.

“Same. I imagine it would be easy to use. Oddly enough, the gemstones are mostly all over the place, although some of it is good.” She dragged over the heaped platter of diamonds and sparkling dust, and unerringly plucked a stone the size of a robin’s egg from the mound, holding it up to catch the faint starlight. “What really confused me is this stuff.” She reached out to indicate a heaped mound of shaved stones.

“Earth Granite?” I noted. “It contains the power of mass and weight. If you Infused, Invested, or Crafted it, you can instill extra weight or power into an item when swung, right? It’s a Power Component for making things Heavy.”

“Oh, this is Earth Granite?” I nodded back to her. “Weird, I can’t tell it from the normal stone. The relationship must be too close.” She glanced over everything else. “How much of this stuff is Energized?”

“Pretty much everything.” That raised her eyebrows. “Not very powerfully, it’s almost residual, and a lot of it is in the lesser Earth bands, so it’s hard to tell. All that ivory, for example, has been treated to Spirit, it’s got aspects of life and souls bound about it. You could use it to fuel a simple Ritual to bind to or sever something from the soul.” It had come from at least a dozen kinds of creatures, too.

“So, this is Earth Marble? And Earth Alabaster?” She touched the mounds of each other kind of rock.

“Yes. I am... not sure what they are used for? I only remember seeing them used in carving statues, as they are significantly more durable and able to resist corrosion than the base stone is. I know in the Matrix system Energized Water Alabaster is a filtering material that can be used to contain and purify liquids stored in them, for instance, turning wine into grape-flavored water if you store it in jugs of the stuff.”

“Well, it’s obviously considered important stuff if they go out of their way to preserve it for something,” she noted, selecting another pile. “But ceramic... really?” She gave me a look, and I just shrugged.

“I have no clue, although those are also Earth-energized. Mostly silicon, as it were, so basically fire-treated silicas?” I just shrugged at her. “I’m blank as far as uses.”

“Not even as a Power Comp?”

“Standard enhancement bonuses to armor? Maybe something anti-fire?” I could only shake my head. “Most of the uses for E-silicas involve glassworks, not ceramics.”

“Can’t believe they didn’t have any usable obsidian. Or carbon, aside from diamond dust,” she muttered.

“Coal and ash isn’t exactly hard to find. Planning on using the iron and steel?” I inquired.

“Why not? It’s there, I need a Shield, a second Weapon, a Floating Furnace, an Anvil of Silent Thunder, and a Shaping Hammer and other Tools. Although no adamantine is going to be annoying...” she complained under her breath.

“Nobody is familiar with adamantine back on Ispar, either,” I reminded her, and she just grunted, smirking slightly as her shoulder twitched in Quaver’s direction. The Sword was definitely adamantine! “Sounds like someone needs to set up shop and do some Artificing,” I noted to her.

She glanced at me, and all the assorted stuff around us. “You can probably Shape up a storage container that can travel along on Disk for this stuff, right?”

“Easily. It would be better if it was wood, however, stronger for the weight.”

“How about Energizing raw materials?” she asked.

“Mmm. Each Energize Spell is different for each Valence, it’s not just one Raised spell that progresses up the Valences. I can do it as part of my one a day, sure.”

“What’s the power comp boost on this stuff without a true Energize?” She waved her hand at everything.

“Maybe fifteen percent? If used on something appropriate for Earth. But... I’m not sure how much of it we should spend without knowing why it was hoarded like it obviously was. Clearly there’s a use for this stuff not in the Matrix system, and I’d like to know what.” A platter of tiny moonstones and fragments thereof slid over to my hand, and I lifted one up, studying it critically.

“So just keep Burning the coins, while working with the raw metal. That’s fine. I’d like an Energize III for tomorrow, when I start working on a Floating Furnace. I’ll need it for the metal.”

“Sounds workable. Make up a list of spells you want from me. I presume Heat Metal is among them, for when it is time.”

Kristie nodded. “Ready for some Naming Karma quick? We should be able to clear the area of Summons pretty easy.”

“We also need to determine if this place is on any of the patrol routes of the undead or shades, and if any of the living tribes of creatures check in here. I am actually damn surprised one of them didn’t take it over. Has to be a reason.”

“Aye, no tracks of anything recent up here, even the birds should be nesting here if nothing comes in.”

“And the eater plants aren’t growing up on top here next to the house.”

She considered that in the growing darkness and silence. “What are you thinking?” she finally asked.

“Either some nasty unwanted visitors are keeping it clear, or something internal, like a haunting.”

“I’m pretty sure one of us would have felt something off if this place was haunted.”

“Which leaves the latter, or something else.” I could only shrug. “It may not mean anything...”

“No, it’s a good point. Should have noticed it, just chalked it up to residual magic of the house. Also, I did a full circuit of the floor down there. No real bones or skeletons of anything in there bigger than bugs or rodents.” She made a face. “Which is also curious, come to think of it, right?”

“I’m not sensing anything in the atmosphere that’s generally capable of cleaning up like that at all, so, yeah, weird.”

She frowned, looking over. “Okay, now that I think about it, the moss and mold growth and stuff wasn’t more than a couple months old and deep, either.”

I inclined my head. “So, something comes through every few months and just scours this place clean, somehow?”

“The number of things that could do that is pretty small, and almost always start with ‘o-o’,” she remarked thoughtfully.

“This place is on the regular hunting sweep of some oozes.” Even I thought the idea was incredulous. “We haven’t seen any on the Summons or on the landscape... which doesn’t mean they aren’t there, and they frequently love swamps.”

“We’ll just have to wait and see. Can be pretty sure the swamp around reacts to their coming, so we should hear them coming by the silence.”

“So, time to hack some Summons quick, get some rest before the Salute, and see how long we can stay in one place and get some stuff done?”

“And hope the locals don’t stumble on us while it happens, if we haven’t been seen already in passing.”

“I’m presuming escape spells are in your dossier of distress,” she replied, unconcerned with the possible future.

“I always have stuff to accumulate,” I agreed, and our course for at least the next couple of days was set.

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I wasn’t going to catch up on my Masteries in arrears, as I still had far too much to do with Classes and Class Levels, while Princess Kristie was soon engaged with both making more Tools and gathering up the materials for her to do so.

It mostly meant going out, finding a suitable tree the next day, and cutting it down.

I was unsurprised that Quaver could turn into an axe, as if she could become a dagger, why not? Thus Kris located an oak that would serve our purposes, turned her Sword into a gleaming Axe, and in a blur of hardness-ignoring chops that bit into the hardwood like it was soft cheese, she brought that oak down in almost total silence inside a Sound Bubble, barely stirring up anything.